There are a lot of posts out there giving trends or predictions for digital marketing in 2020. This post basically looks at the trends and predictions, adds in our own thoughts, and gives you four pointers for your digital marketing efforts in 2020. Let’s dive in.

1. Make good content There are so many ways we could say this, and you’ve probably realized this by now, but content really is king. Well, we should say, good content is king. And that’s going to be a big key in 2020 to any company’s digital marketing efforts. Content marketing has only been growing over the last few years, and we think it’s set to continue to grow in 2020 and beyond, causing more noise than ever and raising the bar that content needs to meet in order to be noticed in the storm. Don’t make content just for the sake of making content — make content that’s good, worth sharing, and worth producing.

2. Adventure into more creativity Marketing has always been a bit of an ugly duckling when it comes to gauging returns, tracking metrics, etc. It’s generally just a little bit difficult to tie specific deliverables to specific metrics to specific business goals, especially when it comes to digital marketing. There are some good tools out there to aid the digital marketer (Hubspot, for example), but as digital marketing is more and more tied to content marketing, the content piece really throws a wrench in everything, as you can’t always predict which specific pieces of content are going to be effective and which ones are going to vanish into the sea of content. Instead of over-analyzing and delaying content production, many more companies will begin to delve into untested waters and try things that haven’t been done before (and so don’t have any data). So stop being afraid of the unknown and try a few new digital marketing tactics.

3. Build your brand As we already began to see in 2019, more brands are creating in-house studios for branded content production. Take Netflix, Amazon, Marriott, and Snapchat for some notable examples. Most of the effort being poured into production of unique content for each of those companies is related to the above trend — they’re venturing forth into uncharted territory, and even though they don’t have very solid data-ground to stand on, they’re building their respective brands in the process. For example, it’s difficult to see how Snapchat would be monetizing its recent web shorts series, but if nothing else, it brought the brand some PR and might improve some users’ perceptions of the brand. Keep that mindset as you get creative with your content.